Georgia Kept Adriana Smith Alive For A Baby It Will Abandon

They named him Chance.

A name heavy with hope, but also haunted by the weight of everything it took to get him here.

Chance, because that’s all he was ever given. Not a choice. Not a plan. Just a fragile gamble that his mother’s body could be kept going long enough to pull him from the stillness of a womb no longer connected to breath or voice.

His life began last Friday in grief, in defiance of his mother’s will, in the cold hum of machines that replaced her breath. And now he carries a name that sounds like possibility but echoes with all the risk, all the uncertainty, all the pain that birthed it.

Adriana Smith, a 31-year-old nurse and mother to another young son, has finally been taken off life support.

Smith was declared brain-dead in February after going to the hospital complaining of severe, persistent headaches. She was in pain. She asked for help. But no scans were run. No tests were ordered. No serious investigation. No urgency. She was sent home, like so many Black patients before her, dismissed with a shrug instead of being treated with lifesaving care. Just another Black woman told to tough it out.

By the next morning, she was gasping for air, gurgling in her sleep. She was rushed to the hospital again. But it was too late. Her brain had already suffered irreversible damage. She was declared brain dead.

But because she was nine weeks pregnant, the state of Georgia ignored her Do Not Resuscitate order and kept her body going against her wishes. Her family’s pleas were disregarded. Under Georgia’s LIFE Act, a near-total abortion ban that grants fetal personhood after six weeks, Adriana’s body was legally conscripted into service.

Even though the Georgia Attorney General’s office later said the law doesn’t require life support after brain death, that didn’t matter. The hospital acted as if it did. Politicians backed it. And Adriana’s body became state property.

For months, her family was forced to sit bedside as machines breathed for her, pumped her heart, and turned her into a state-mandated incubator for a fetus already diagnosed with life-threatening complications.

To keep a brain-dead body functioning that long is not simple. It is not passive. It is not peaceful. It is invasive. It is violent. In Smith’s case, it was a grotesque medical choreography, performed not for healing, but for state control.

Her chest would have mechanically risen and fallen, not with breath, but with forced ventilation, oxygen pushed into tissue that could no longer ask for it. Her lifeless limbs would have been repositioned every few hours to prevent the rot of pressure ulcers. A catheter in her bladder. Tubes in her nose, her throat, her stomach. Needles piercing her veins. IV drips adjusted, blood pressure meds administered, hormones replaced. Antibiotics cycling to hold off infection. Medications to prevent kidney failure. A feeding tube to nourish a fetus she could no longer cradle, protect, or even know existed.

Her skin, once warm and vibrant, likely turned cool to the touch, requiring blankets to mimic the heat of life. Her heart may have needed chemical support or electrical pacing to keep beating. And all of this was done not to save Adriana Smith. She was gone. Her brain, the seat of her selfhood, was irreversibly silent.

Keeping Adriana Smith on life support wasn’t about compassion or faith. And it damn sure wasn’t about valuing a Black child’s life. It was about extraction. It was about power. It was about the state exercising its ability to override a Black woman’s autonomy, to erase her voice in death, to reduce her to a womb with no say in what happens to her body, even when that body is legally dead.

It’s a twisted extension of the plantation logic. Black women’s bodies exist for reproduction, for extraction, for service, whether we consent or not. It is reproductive coercion cloaked in moral language. And it is political performance dressed up as medical concern.

This young Black mother was no longer a person to the state. She had become a womb. An object. A policy tool. A cautionary tale wrapped in political performance.

And it should haunt the hell out of every one of us. And it should force every one of us to ask: If the state can claim your body when you’re pregnant, even after death, what part of you is really free?

Because in a country that has never valued Black motherhood, that has brutalized pregnant Black women in life and in death, that has shot, lynched, burned, experimented on, sterilized, and neglected us—why this? Why now? Why was this Black woman kept artificially alive to deliver a baby into a system that won’t protect him?

Those questions aren’t just rhetorical. They’re structural. What we witnessed was a medically sanctioned desecration. If this can be done to Adriana Smith, if her legally dead body can be hijacked by the state, stripped of dignity, autonomy, and humanity, then it can be done to legions more.

Smith’s mother had to celebrate her child’s 31st birthday beside a corpse. Had to whisper prayers beside a ventilator’s hiss. Had to watch as the daughter she raised, who once danced, laughed, and saved lives as a nurse, was reduced to a body in a bed kept alive by wires, drips, and laws that cared more about “fetal personhood” than Black womanhood.

A system that overrides a Black woman’s explicit end-of-life wishes, that voids her Do Not Resuscitate order, that forces her grieving family to watch her be used like an incubator rather than mourned like a daughter, is a system that does not see us as fully human. This was not an isolated failure. It was the logical endpoint of a culture that disbelieves Black women’s pain, that dismisses our warnings, that devalues our lives, and now, our deaths.

Because when a brain-dead woman’s body becomes a battleground for ideological warfare, when political agendas take precedence over medical ethics, and when the dead are kept breathing just to satisfy the delusions of the living, we’re not in the realm of care. We’re in the realm of cruelty.

Now, after an emergency C-section last Friday, baby Chance, weighs less than 2 pounds and is clinging to life in the NICU. And his mother has finally been allowed to rest in death—something the state refused her in life.

Be clear, this is not a miracle story. It’s a medical and moral catastrophe. This isn’t just about abortion rights, it’s about human rights. Medical ethics. Racial injustice. The long American tradition of using Black women’s bodies without consent.

Chance is here. His family is praying for him. His grandmother said in an interview that “he’s fighting.” And we all hope he survives.

But what now?

Will the politicians who insisted Adriana remain on life support step forward to pay his NICU bills? Will they ensure access to specialists, therapies, surgeries, childcare, and long-term support? Will they be there when his needs don’t fit within insurance limits, or when Medicaid gets slashed?

Or will they vanish, having extracted what they wanted from a Black woman’s body, her labor, her womb, her silence?

And for what?

What does the state actually gain from forcing a child like Chance into the world under such circumstances? In a nation where disabled children, especially Black disabled children, are rarely afforded dignity, let alone comprehensive care?

Will he be funneled into underfunded schools where his needs go unmet, and his behavior is pathologized? Will he be labeled “at risk” by the age of three, criminalized by ten, surveilled by fifteen? Will his body be tracked through the same school-to-prison pipeline that catches so many Black boys?

Or perhaps the state profits in other ways: through the vast network of institutions that manage Black life, including healthcare systems, special education services, foster care programs, juvenile justice, and adult corrections. Every one of them a multi-billion dollar industry that feeds on Black struggle and Black survival.

And if Chance is disabled, what then? Will he be reduced to numbers on a budget sheet, a target for cost-cutting, a candidate for institutionalization? A life deemed too expensive, too inconvenient, too Black?

This isn’t just about forced birth. It’s about forced vulnerability. Forced dependency. Forced exposure to systems designed not to nurture but to contain. Because in this country, a Black fetus has more rights than a Black child that’s already here. And a Black child has more value to the state when he’s in crisis than when he’s simply allowed to live and be fully nurtured by his parents.

Keeping a brain-dead Black woman on life support may seem, on the surface, like an act of “pro-life” conviction, but don’t be fooled. This was not about valuing Black motherhood or Black children.

This was political theater. A distraction. A bit of legislative window dressing meant to give the illusion of moral consistency. Because the truth is that the right-wing obsession with forced birth has never been about protecting all life. It’s always been about preserving white life. It’s been about staving off what they call “replacement,” about panicked birth rates and the slow, steady decline of white demographics in this country.

They are not fighting to protect Black babies. They are not marching to save Brown ones. In fact, many of these same lawmakers have passed or supported policies that gut Medicaid, defund maternal health programs, ban books about racism, criminalize poverty, and block access to housing and healthcare. All these are policies that ensure Black and Brown children suffer once they’re born.

So, let’s not mistake Georgia’s decision to apply this law to Adriana Smith as evidence of racial inclusion. It was a political performance. Her body became a prop in a larger ideological campaign whose real aim is to secure the survival of whiteness under the guise of defending life.

Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and author of “Spare The Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Children In Jim Crow America.” Read her Substack here.

Adriana Smith: Pregnant Brain-Dead Woman To Remain Alive To Give Birth

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